The declaration echoes in the hollow chambers of my heart. The Moon marked me for Her own. For a single, breathtaking moment, the words are an impenetrable shield. The cold, the hunger, the soul-deep ache of my isolation—they all fall away, meaningless in the face of this new, earth-shattering truth. I am not a flaw. I am not an absence. I am something other. Something… more. The idea is so vast, so powerful, it threatens to consume me. I am no longer just Elara, the Rejected. I am a child of the Moon.
And then, my stomach gives a violent, cramping lurch, and the grand, cosmic revelation comes crashing down to earth.
My new identity cannot fill my belly. My connection to the tides cannot quench my thirst. The glorious, terrifying truth of my bloodline is a shield for the soul, but my body is still a frail, human thing, and it is failing. The brief reprieve granted by the moonlight has faded, leaving behind the primal, undeniable demands of a body starved for days. The dizziness returns, not from fever now, but from a profound, gnawing emptiness.
I press a hand to my belly, the hollow ache a grim reminder that epiphanies, no matter how profound, are not food. The world may have changed for me, but my predicament has not. I am still alone. I am still in a hostile forest. And I am still going to die if I cannot find something to eat.
My pack-life, as brief and miserable as it was, taught me some things. Every omega child learns the basics of foraging—which leaves are safe for tea, which roots can be boiled to make a thin stew, which bark can be chewed to ward off hunger pangs. It's omega work, deemed beneath the notice of warriors and betas, but right now, it's the most valuable knowledge I possess.
I get to my feet, my legs still trembling with weakness, and begin to scan the forest floor with a desperate urgency. My eyes alight on a familiar cluster of broad, green leaves with a distinctive purple vein. Mugwort. Good for settling a nervous stomach. I've picked it a hundred times on the edges of the pack's territory. I reach for it, but as my fingers hover over the leaves, a wave of… wrongness… washes over me. That new, humming sense inside me, the one that awakened with the moonlight, recoils. It's a quiet but insistent alarm, a dissonant chord in the newfound harmony of my senses.
Not this one, it seems to whisper. This is not what you need.
I pull my hand back, confused. But it looked exactly the same. I shake my head, dismissing it as a lingering trick of the fever. Hunger is making me doubt myself.
I move on, my eyes scanning for anything I recognize. I spot a patch of small, red berries growing on a low-lying bush. They look almost identical to the winterberries the pack healers used in their energy poultices. Hope, sharp and painful, lances through me. This could be enough. Enough to give me the strength to keep moving.
But again, as I reach for them, the same inner revulsion stops me. This time it's stronger, a clear and present sense of danger. The berries might look right, but my core, my very essence, screams that they are poison.
Frustration boils up in my throat, hot and bitter. I have this new power, this incredible, impossible knowledge that I am a witch, yet I am going to starve to death because I can't even identify a simple berry? What good is being marked by the Moon if I can't survive one week in the woods? It's a cruel cosmic joke. Am I to be granted this power only to perish before I can even begin to understand it?
Tears of pure, helpless frustration well in my eyes. I clench my fists, my ragged nails digging into my palms. It's useless. My old knowledge, my pack-life, my omega training—it's all worthless here. It can't save me.
I sink to my knees in the damp earth, utterly defeated. I close my eyes, giving up on the failed memories of my past. I can't trust what I think I know. So what is left? Only this. This new, strange, humming sense inside me.
I take a ragged breath and, instead of trying to look for something familiar, I simply… let go. I stop trying to see with my eyes and instead focus inward, on that quiet thrumming beneath my skin. I don't ask for a specific plant or a root. I just focus on the raw, desperate cry of my body. Nourish. Sustain. Heal.
The world behind my eyelids shifts. When I open them again, everything has changed.
It's breathtaking. The forest is no longer just a tangle of greens and browns. It's a living, breathing tapestry of light. Faint, shimmering lines of energy, like veins of liquid mercury, crisscross through everything. They weave from the soil into the roots of trees, spiral up the trunks, and unfurl into every single leaf. The air itself is alive with them.
And I can read them. Instinctively.
I look back at the red berries I almost ate. The silvery lines flowing into them are thin, stagnant, and tinged with a sickly, chaotic pulse of deep, angry red. Poison. My inner sense hadn't been wrong.
Then my gaze drifts to a patch of dirt nearby, a spot I had dismissed as empty. But now, I can see a network of bright, placid silver lines flowing into the earth, pulsing with a gentle, inviting light. Life. Nourishment.
My heart hammering with a new kind of hope, I crawl over to the spot. My fingers, weak but determined, dig into the soft, loamy soil. A few inches down, they close around something hard and dense. I pull, and a handful of small, pale, tuber-like roots come free from the earth. They look like nothing I've ever seen before. My old self would have thrown them away as inedible. But my new senses sing with their life-giving energy.
I brush the dirt from one and take a tentative bite. The taste is clean, earthy, and incredibly, powerfully revitalizing. It's like eating solid energy. I can feel the strength from it spreading through my limbs almost instantly, a warm, steadying presence chasing away the weakness.
I devour the rest of them, my hunger a wild thing. It's the most delicious meal of my life. The lines of light lead me next to a rock face covered in a thick layer of moss. Behind it, a thin but steady line of pure, brilliant blue energy pulses. Hidden spring water. I press my face to a crack in the rock and drink the cool, clean water, the purest I have ever tasted.
I am satiated. I am safe. I have survived not by my old knowledge, but by my new power. I have trusted myself, this new self, and I have been rewarded. A deep, quiet sense of awe settles over me.
As I rest against the rock, catching my breath and reveling in the feeling of a full stomach, a flicker of movement catches my eye.
The Moon-Fox is back.
It pads into the clearing as silently as a ghost, its starlight fur a stark and beautiful contrast to the deep green of the forest. It approaches me not with the wariness of before, but with a calm, deliberate purpose. Its sapphire eyes hold an intelligence that sends a shiver down my spine. This is no mere animal. It is a guide. A messenger. An agent of the Moon.
It stops a few feet from me, lowers its head, and gently nudges something from behind a fern with its nose. The object it pushes toward me is dark and heavy. The fox watches me for a moment longer, its gaze intense and meaningful, then it sits down on its haunches, tucks its magnificent silver-tipped tail around its paws, and simply waits, as if its task is complete.
My gaze drops to what it has brought me. It is an old, weathered leather satchel, the kind a traveling scholar might have carried centuries ago. The leather is cracked and stiff with age, the stitching frayed. It's sealed not with a buckle or a tie, but with a small, circular lock made of a strange, dark wood, bearing a single, intricate carving of a crescent moon. It seems ancient and impossible to open.